


Blinding

by StilesBastille24



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: First Kiss, Get Together, M/M, POV-Bucky Barnes, Really a fluff fic though, allusions to depression, historically inaccurate shoewear
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-24
Updated: 2015-08-24
Packaged: 2018-04-17 00:41:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,927
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4645986
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StilesBastille24/pseuds/StilesBastille24
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bucky had trudged quietly alongside Steve for three months as they both attempted to adjust to life in 2015. Three months while Bucky adjusted to Avengers, to Natasha Romanov, to Sam Wilson, to the guy with the eye patch that Bucky still couldn’t get a read on. Three months for Bucky to see what a mess Steve was and wonder how the hell all these other idiots had completely missed it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Blinding

**Author's Note:**

> I love how Chris Evans plays Steve Rogers adjusting to his new life, how he makes it an obvious struggle and one that isn't always happy. I wanted to explore that with Bucky as a counterpoint. But I also wanted it to be fluffy? So this ended up as some mish-mash of that. 
> 
> Title from the Florence & the Machine song of the same name because it's a Bucky song to me.

Bucky was aware that he probably wasn’t a fully functioning person at this point in his life. The last thing he clearly remembered was falling from a train in 1945. As if it had happened last year or a few months back. 

The space in between that memory and his present was filled with things that shouldn’t have happened. Like an impossible surgery to attach his metal arm, learning how to kill more efficiently than a machine, sliding through the pages of history killing one mark at a time. Things that were blurred at the edges and yet muscle memory.

He was a mess. He got that. He wasn’t that worried about it. He was worried about Steve. 

They were sharing an apartment, a tiny one at that, because Steve had looked at Bucky with lost eyes and asked if he needed a place to stay. Bucky could have got his own place, wrangled it one way or another. But that wasn’t what Steve was asking. Steve was asking if Bucky needed him, and Bucky had always needed Steve, so he said yes. And now, here they were.

“You okay there, pal?” Bucky asked, watching Steve out of the corner of his eye as his friend drew yet another iteration of Peggy Carter circa 1944. 

It had been four months since Project Insight fell burning from the sky, Bucky and Steve along with it. And yeah, it might have been fair to say that Bucky hadn’t gotten his shit in order for a month after that. But excuse him, his brain was a scrambled egg and it always took a few weeks out of cryo for the memories to slip in and replace the blank slate Hydra had worked so hard to create in his mind. 

So that gave Bucky three months to trudge quietly alongside Steve as they both attempted to adjust to life in 2015. As Bucky adjusted to Avengers, to Natasha Romanoff, to Sam Wilson, to the guy with the eye patch that Bucky still couldn’t get a read on. To see what a fucking mess Steve was and wonder how the hell all these other assholes had completely missed it. 

“Hm?” Steve asked, pencil shading in Peggy’s irises. He didn’t lift his gaze from his sketch, the butter yellow light of the living room making Steve’s paper look cream instead of white. 

Bucky frowned. “You wanna get out of here for a bit? Could stretch our legs in Central Park if you want. Buy shady street food then bitch about it when we get food poisoning?” His lips formed a smile he didn’t feel. 

Steve nodded absently, not really listening, lost in a time and place that seemed only yesterday to them but was out of their reach by more than five decades. 

Bucky flicked off the TV and the basketball game he’d only been half watching. Sports were one of the few things he could stomach at this point. Sitcoms and dramas he just didn’t get. Everything was so different, the personalities, the clothes, the décor, all of it. Gave him a headache just trying to keep up. 

Crossing the minimal space to Steve’s side at the kitchen table, Bucky clamped his metal hand down softly on Steve’s shoulder. Steve flinched at the touch and Bucky knew it wasn’t his mechanics Steve was reacting to, it was the presence of another human being. Bucky forced his smile wider to prevent himself from scowling. 

“Hey, Stevie. Do me a favor, one pal to another, I’m going stir crazy here. Take your best bud to Central Park, would ya?” His free hand slipped to the sketch pad and tugged it gently out of Steve’s reach. 

Twisting to the side, Steve looked over his shoulder at him. “Central Park?”

“Yeah, you heard of the place? Big sprawling square of dirt, grass, and trees?”

A hollow smile curved the corner of Steve’s mouth up. “Huh, yeah, I might have heard something about it.”

“Great.” Bucky clapped his shoulder. “Then let’s go, daylight’s a-wasting.”

He waited the sparse seconds it took for Steve to get in motion, pushing his chair back and standing up, before Bucky headed to his room for a change of shirt and to find his sneakers. 

Sneakers were great, in Bucky’s opinion, one of the things he glommed onto right away in this new time. Between the two of them, Steve and Bucky had about six pairs. Different colors, different treads, some called high tops. Today, Bucky tugged on a pair of what Darcy Lewis called ‘chucks,’ red high tops that matched the red star on his arm. 

Tony Stark had wanted to paint over the star, a shield, like Steve’s. Bucky had glared in response. The arm was Bucky’s. Screw Hydra for thinking they could have a part of his body. It was his and so was that damn star and the only thing they meant were that they were Bucky’s. He didn’t need a shield, he had a star, and it was his damn star. 

So the star stayed and Bucky went out of his way to wear red clothes to match it. He was fashionable that way. Or obnoxious. Depended on which member of the broken down SHIELD operative you asked. 

When Bucky came back into the living room, Steve was leaning against the front door, frowning down at his phone. It was his confused frown, where his eyebrows dipped down in the middle and the sides of his mouth tugged low at the corners. Bucky shelved his sigh for another time; Steve’s constant confusion over technology was not something he found humor in like the other agents seemed to.

Why the hell would either of them know how to use any of this crap? The last time they had been walking around the world, technology was for the war only, not vain things like phones and entertainment. 

Sidling up to his friend and plucking the phone free of Steve’s grasp, Bucky asked, "Everything alright?” 

“Hey,” Steve protested but it lacked any heat. 

Bucky glanced at the screen and saw a message from Sam about the next VA meeting. “We going?” Bucky asked. 

Steve’s frown grew more pronounced. “We don’t have anything in common with those guys, Buck. It wouldn’t be right for us to intrude on their time.”

Bucky let his look of complete incredulity assess Steve from head to toe. “Don’t know where you’re coming up with that, pal. Sam talked to me about those meetings, said a lot of people come back feeling displaced, like the place they left is gone and they don’t know how to fit into the world anymore.” He quirked an eyebrow and gestured between the two of them. “Sound like anyone you know?”

Steve’s frown didn’t wane. “That’s not the same.”

Bucky rolled his eyes. “Whatever, we’ll talk about it later, punk. Right now you’re supposed to be showing me around a mound of dirt and grass, remember?”

Steve grabbed his phone back and jammed it into his pocket before pulling open the front door. “Then let’s get this show on the road.”

The summer air was warm, humid; Bucky’s hair clung to the sides of his face and he thought about cutting it. Except he’d seen the haircuts guys walked around with these days. He’d seen what Steve was doing with his hair, shoving up the front like he’d gotten socked in the face by a stiff breeze. Bucky wasn’t sure he was ready for those changes yet. So his hair stayed long, most of the time yanked back in a bun with hair ties Natasha forced on him. 

Bucky liked Natasha the most out of Steve’s new friends. She had cornered Bucky, around the second month post-Winter Solider, and tugged up the hem of her shirt. Bucky hadn’t a clue what was going on, an impromptu strip tease? Then she’d grabbed his hand and pressed it against the gnarled skin of her otherwise smooth stomach. 

“Do you remember this?” she’d asked. 

He’d shook his head, at a complete loss of words because the way she said it, he knew he was suppose to remember it.

“There was a target I was protecting, you shot through me to get to him.” She stared hard into his eyes. 

Bucky nodded to show he was listening, then he pulled his hand free from her grasp. “That wasn’t me. I’m sorry that happened to you. And I’m sorry I was used to do that to you, but that wasn’t me.”

To his bewilderment, Natasha had smiled, one hand coming up to cup his cheek. “Good for you, Bucky Barnes. Now pass some of that sensibility onto Rogers, okay? Because he thinks it’s his fault you fell from that train.”

It was just the tip of the iceberg of what Steve wanted to blame himself for and Bucky was discovering that little by little each day. And he was trying to talk Steve out of it day by day too. It was a slow go, but Bucky figured Steve had had time to work up these walls of guilt in his mind while Bucky had been wandering mindless with his metal arm. It was gonna take them awhile to break them down again, but that was okay, Bucky was willing to wait it out. 

They walked through the winding paths of Central Park, kids screaming, families picnicking, groups doing something called yoga. It was peaceful, or at least it should have been, except Steve looked like he wasn’t even here, like the only thing keeping him grounded was Bucky’s less than casual arm around his shoulders. 

“Hey,” Bucky said, steering them toward an unoccupied bench that he quickly checked over for bird shit or other questionable stains before sitting down on. “You with me?”

Steve glanced at him and tried to smile, or at least that’s what Bucky assumed the feeble twitch of his lips meant. “Right here, Buck.”

“You sure?” Bucky pressed. 

The sunlight fell through the trees in patterns of green light and dark shadows, the leaves rustling together like the sound of running water, it stirred the strands of Bucky’s hair, and cooled the sweat on his skin. He kicked his red sneaker into Steve’s more sedate black ones. 

“You ever think – “ Steve stopped, looking above them to the shaded sky. 

Bucky waited him out a minute but when nothing followed, he said, “I have, in fact, been known to think on an occasion or two.” 

A barely there smile quirked the side of Steve’s mouth and Bucky held in his fist pump of victory. Jesus. It had always been hard to get Steve to smile; Steve’s life was not some happy little Dick and Jane story. It was a shit show from start to finish with this brief blaze of glory near the end. And that had never been what Steve deserved. Steve deserved the fucking world and Bucky had been desperately trying to give it to him since age five. 

But unlike back then, Bucky thought he had a real chance of doing it now, in this century. They had money, in this century. They had friends, powerful friends. Steve was healthy for once in his life. They could do this, Bucky was sure, but he needed to get Steve on board for that and right now, Steve was still on that damned plane, sunk in the bottom of the ocean. 

“Did Tasha really try to set you up with Sharon Carter?” Bucky asked, abrupt and off topic.

Steve looked surprised, glancing over at Bucky. “Yeah, why?”

“Think it’s weird, is all, since you were dating or almost dating her aunt two years ago.” He measured his words so they were casual, so they were unremarkable. 

“Two years . . . Bucky!” Steve stared at him with wide eyes. “Bucky, that was seventy years ago.”

Bucky hooked up an unimpressed eyebrow. “Nah. Two years ago. I remember, Peggy in that red dress of hers refusing to so much as look in my direction, staring at you like she was going to lick you from head to toe.”

“Bucky,” Steve hissed, the tips of his ears burning bright red the same way they had before he was Captain America. 

Bucky smiled, pleased with his effect. “What? It’s true. That’s why it’s weird too. Tasha wanting you to go out with some dame related to Peggy.”

Steve fisted his hands together between his knees, the summer breeze attempting to flow against his hair but failing against the superhero gel he adhered to his bangs every morning, afternoon, and night. Bucky was trying his best to find all the stashes of gel and throw them out. Steve had lived twenty-eight years without gelling up his bangs, he didn’t need to start now.

“She’s nice, Sharon,” Steve said to his knees.

“Uh-huh,” Bucky agreed. “Sure, I bet she’s a swell gal, but she’s also a Carter and one that’s not Peggy. So it’s weird. And I’m going to be worried if you don’t think that’s weird, Stevie.”

There was silence for a beat, except for the sounds of everyone around them enjoying a summer day in the park. Then Steve exhaled a tense breath. “Jesus, yes, it’s so weird, Bucky.”

Bucky smirked triumphantly, slinging his arm back around Steve’s broad shoulders. “And you don’t gotta feel bad about that, pal. Just like the girl with the lip ring, Tasha told me about her too. And I met her, fine looking dame, even with the metal through her lip; shit, maybe better looking because of it, but you don’t have to want her neither. Because two years ago, a ring through your lip would have been as wild as a dame not wearing a hat to church on Sunday.”

“But it wasn’t two years ago, Buck,” Steve argued. “It was seventy and –“

“And bullshit,” Bucky interrupted. “It was seventy years ago for everybody else, but you and me? We ain’t everybody else, Stevie. For us, it was two years ago. Screw anybody who thinks we need to be playing catch-up on seventy years of history. We don’t have to adjust to this century until we damn well please, that’s our god given right.”

The seconds ticked away in silence until Bucky began to worry that he had pushed too hard and Steve was going to retreat even further into the past than he already was, going to retreat without taking Bucky with him. That was all Bucky wanted, he wanted to go wherever Steve went. He’d follow him to the ends of the earth, he’d always done that. 

Eventually Steve said, “It’s not even the lip ring,” and Bucky allowed himself to breathe again. “It’s – well, Bucky someone shoved that metal through her lip.” He glanced up sharply at Bucky for affirmation. 

Bucky nodded, keeping his smile to himself over seeing Steve so befuddled. 

“I mean, someone did that, Bucky. It was someone’s job to pierce a hole through that girl’s lip and shove a piece of metal through it.”

The smile inched its way onto the corner of his mouth. “Someone shoved a piece of metal into my shoulder socket, but you don’t seem to broke up about that.”

Steve huffed, fingers unlinking between his knees finally. “That’s different.”

“Why? Cuz I look so good with my shiny fingers?” Bucky made jazz hands with his metal arm, the summer sun glinting off metal and dazzling their eyes. 

Steve reached out, lacing his fingers through Bucky’s metals ones and pulling their intertwined hands into his lap. “It’s different because it’s you, jerk.”

Bucky looked at the mosaic of their hands then up at Steve’s profile trying to slot the pieces into place because something was happening here and Bucky was missing a few essential elements to get the whole story. “You saying you’d like me with a piece of metal shoved through my lip?” he asked curiously. 

Steve shrugged, thumb tracing over the plates visible past the leather glove on Bucky’s hand. “It’d be your lip.”

“Uh-huh, my lip with a hunk of metal shoved through it,” Bucky spelled out. Steve shrugged again. Bucky spun this over in his thoughts. “How about my eyebrow?” 

Steve glanced over at him. “What about it?”

“If I got a piece of metal shoved through it.”

“People do that?” Steve’s nose crinkled up making Bucky smile. 

“Yeah, Stevie, they do. And if I did it?”

Another shrug. 

Bucky thought about what Sam had told him, how he’d asked Steve what made him happy and Steve hadn’t known the answer. But maybe that wasn’t true. Maybe Steve did know what made him happy and just didn’t think he’d be allowed to have it. Maybe Steve wasn’t just lost in the past, maybe he didn’t know how to wade through the present. 

“So if I decide I want to get hunks of metal shoved through me, you gonna go with me? Hold my hand? Tell me I look all pretty?” 

Steve smirked. “You really need somebody to stroke your ego like that, Bucky?”

“Well,” Bucky allowed, “as long as it’s you doing the stroking.” He leaned into Steve’s side. 

Steve tensed, fingers clutching against Bucky’s hand. “I – uh – I missed you,” Steve said quietly. 

“I’ve been looking for you for seventy years,” Bucky answered simply. “Might not always have been me, might not always have been clear, but it was always you I was looking for, even when I wasn’t myself.”

“When I woke up,” Steve’s fingers resumed drawing patters on Bucky’s metal hand, “my first thought was that it had all been a dream. The whole thing, not just the plane crash, but all the way back to you leaving for the war. Then I remembered and I wanted to find Peggy. Then I did and all I wanted was to find you. Because if I could be here and Peggy was still here, then where the hell were you?”

“Sorry, pal.” The words came out soft and fragile. Bucky tightened his hold on Steve’s hand. 

“I should have looked for you,” Steve said fiercely. “I should have jumped down after you. I should have caught you.” It came out in a torrent, a long stopped up flood of self-recrimination. 

“What? So we could both be metal soldiers?” Bucky asked in exasperation. “Steve, don’t be stupid. What happened to me was never your fault. I never thought that. I fell thinking I’d saved you. I would never have forgiven you if you had taken that away from me by doing something as stupid as jumping after me.” 

“I should have found you,” Steve argued as if he hadn’t heard Bucky’s words at all. 

“You did,” Bucky said, tugging their hands onto his lap and forcing Steve to look at him. “You found me four months ago when I wasn’t even me anymore. And you saved me. And I’m here with you now, and we’re both here together. You got me, pal, you’ve always had me.”

Steve’s all-American blue eyes ran over Bucky’s face with a desperate hunger that made Bucky realize Steve had been holding back more than he’d ever given away. “I don’t know if I can do this, I don’t know if I can be the person they want me to be.”

“Then don’t be,” Bucky said, squeezing Steve’s hand tight. “You don’t got to be anybody but yourself, Steve. You don’t have to be happy that we’re here, you don’t have to think our past was seventy years ago when it was two, you don’t have to want to be Captain America anymore.”

“That’s who they need,” Steve admitted, his shoulders slumped, defeated.

Bucky shook his head. “Nope, that doesn’t matter. It only matters what you need, and if that isn’t enough for you, do it because I need you to. Be who you’ve always been because that’s who I’ve always needed. I never needed Captain America, you know? You remember? I wasn’t following Captain America, I was following that skinny kid from Brooklyn, and I’m still following him. Till the end of the line, right?”

Steve watched him, as if waiting for Bucky to change his mind and take it all back. When that didn’t happen, Steve crumpled forward, his forehead resting against Bucky’s shoulder. Bucky tensed, worried Steve was going to break down or something. 

Instead, he mumbled, “I don’t get Facebook,” against Bucky’s t-shirt. 

Bucky huffed a laugh in surprise. “I don’t get those tv screen advertisements in Time Square.”

Steve snickered against Bucky’s chest, his breath warm through the fabric of the shirt even in the summer heat. “I think the microwave is evil.”

“Kids have wheels in the heels of the shoes. That’s evil, Steve, true evil.”

“I’ve broken four touch screen tablets that Tony keeps forcing on me because I jabbed at them instead of sliding.”

“I drop kicked Natasha’s vacuum robot thing. Thought it was a bomb or something. She made me buy her a new one.”

Steve threw his head back to laugh, dislodging Bucky’s arm from around his shoulders. Bucky used the freedom to mess up Steve’s hair, dragging his fingers through the gel until it came unstiff. Then Steve reached up and took that hand in his own, so that both were between their legs, turned into each other as they were. 

“I love you,” Steve said, eyes still smiling. “And I’ve been waiting two years or seventy to tell you that, depending on how you want to count time.”

Bucky’s heart lurched in his chest, but in a good way, in a way he hadn’t felt since the 1940s with Steve towering over him in Zola’s lab. “I love you too.” 

It was the truth, had always been the truth, one they didn’t bury because everyone knew it. Just didn’t mean it was romantic. Didn’t need to be, when you loved each other like they did, when you needed each other like they did, like air, like breathing, like your heart beating. 

Steve tilted his head to the side. “And I’d want to kiss you even if you had a piece of metal through your lip.”

Bucky laughed, mouth curving into a smile. That _was_ new. But Bucky was okay with that, he’d be okay with anything if it meant he got to keep Steve. “That mean you wanna kiss me if I don’t have one, too?” he teased. 

“Uh-huh.” Steve leaned forward slowly, waiting for Bucky to meet him halfway there. And he did, their lips pressing together, a gentle pressure that was all the hope Bucky needed that Steve was going to be okay. 

When they pulled apart, Steve’s smile was the brightest thing Bucky had seen in four months. “I’m really glad we can do that now.”

“I’m really glad someone invented sneakers,” Bucky said, kicking his into Steve’s. 

Laughter spilled into the space between them. “Froyo is amazing.”

“Cars have improved tremendously.” 

“Peggy Carter got to be a superhero,” Steve said with the admiration he reserved especially for his best girl. 

“I’m here with you,” Bucky said, lips brushing against the corner of Steve’s mouth until Steve’s hand caught his chin and held him place for a proper kiss. 

“Yeah,” Steve said, eyes still closed, lips still smiling and wet, “yeah, that’s the best part, Bucky.”

Bucky pulled Steve close, lips pressing a kiss to Steve’s temple. So maybe Bucky was a mess and maybe Steve was a mess too, but they could sort it out together. That’s what they had always done, after all.

**Author's Note:**

> [Tumblr](http://www.blueeyeschina.tumblr.com)


End file.
